


Soon Dawn Appeared And Touched the Sky With Roses

by moemachina



Category: Senjou no Valkyria | Valkyria Chronicles
Genre: Denial of Feelings, M/M, Mise en abyme, Nested Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23225521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moemachina/pseuds/moemachina
Summary: They sat in a copse of trees on the edge of a meadow. As the sky overhead grew brighter, the grass before them was shifting from gray to green, and little dots of yellow wildflowers were growing visible. On the edge of Faldio's vision, he could see the lumbering outline of a tank.If he turned his head, he would see the gray smoke still rising from the battlefield -- but he did not turn his head.
Relationships: Welkin Gunther/Faldio Landzaat
Comments: 1
Kudos: 14





	Soon Dawn Appeared And Touched the Sky With Roses

**Author's Note:**

> "Look, I want to mortally wound your magic girlfriend because of my virulent jingoism, not because of my conflicted feelings for you, my deeply beloved best friend for life." 
> 
> Based entirely on the 2008 PS3 game, although the Internet tells me the anime adaptation invents a love triangle (!!!). 
> 
> Title from Emily Wilson's translation of _The Odyssey_.

As it so often did, the morning brought the promise of better things. The sun was rising, turning the sky the color of a peach, and the wind had -- at long last -- shifted to carry away the burning smell of last night's battlefield. 

"It's mornings like this," Faldio said, leaning back against a broad tree trunk, "that I remember that damn poem that Dr. Jansen made us memorize. You remember the one? The one about blushing dawn and the maiden in the forest?" 

Beside him, Welkin made a faint noise. It might have been a 'yes.' 

"Of course, at the end, that prince gets torn apart by his own hunting dogs, so it all concludes in blood and screams and symbolism for a fallen empire, according to Dr. Jansen." Faldio gave a dry cough in imitation of their old professor. 

Welkin sighed.

"But the beginning! Where everything is so pretty and serene, and the birds are singing, and the whole sky flushes in warmth..." Faldio drew his knees up and rested his arms across them. "The beginning of that poem is what I remember on mornings like this." 

Welkin said nothing, but Faldio could feel him breathing deeply and evenly. 

They sat in a copse of trees on the edge of a meadow. As the sky overhead grew brighter, the grass before them was shifting from gray to green, and little dots of yellow wildflowers were growing visible. On the edge of Faldio's vision, he could see the lumbering outline of a tank.

If he turned his head, he would see the gray smoke still rising from the battlefield -- but he did not turn his head. 

"I remember reading our essays in Jansen's office. He told me that I devoted too much analysis to the very beginning, that it was sentimental, emotional. Soppy, even." He grinned and shook his head. "He told you that you spent too much time identifying all the plants in the poem." 

Faldio plucked a blade of grass from the ground beside him and began to carefully shred it into narrow slices. He also remembered, though he did not say, Welkin's expression of wide-eyed puzzlement as Jansen flayed apart his essay. Jansen was a difficult man to please -- _a dyspeptic fool_ , Faldio's father had angrily muttered more than once -- but he had been especially incensed by Welkin's long digressions into the technical taxonomy of the flora and fauna in the poem. 

To be fair, Welkin was not the most graceful of writers. He was a man who loved simple sentences and had no fear of passive verbs. Every week, they had met in Jansen's dark and dusty office, sitting on a deeply uncomfortable bench while Jansen leaned back in an armchair and smoked a pipe. They would read aloud their weekly essay until Jansen ordered them to stop so that he could insert a stinging criticism. Welkin had experienced frequent interruptions. It was a mercy, some weeks, if he managed to make it through a full paragraph without Jansen springing upright to deliver an enraged interjection. 

Faldio filled his essays with rhetorical flourishes and embellishments from his well-thumbed thesaurus. Jansen would occasionally roll his eyes and object to _too many adjectives, Landzaat_ , but by and large, he would allow Faldio to read unimpeded. He would wait until the end of Faldio's oration to deliver his criticisms. 

Welkin was never so lucky. 

Faldio was now remembering the end of this particular tutorial meeting over this particular rosy-fingered poem: Jansen irritably checking his watch and ushering them out of his office, the bright sunlight from the hallway windows, how confused and troubled Welkin had seemed. 

"Well, at least that's over," Faldio had said, trying to be cheerful. "It could have been worse." 

Welkin had given a weak smile. "I guess." He took a deep breath and looked down at his essay, still clutched in his right hand. "I guess. " 

"Come on," Faldio had said. "Let's go see if Café Cirio is open. We can get a drink." 

Café Cirio had indeed been open, and with one-and-a-half dark beers inside him, Welkin grew slightly more animated.

"But it doesn't make any sense for the golden choux to be blooming _and_ the ruby-throated zwinger to be warbling," he had said. "It's totally improbable. The golden choux blooms in early spring, and the ruby-throated zwinger doesn't migrate north until late spring." 

Faldio raised an eyebrow. "Well, my little birder, if not the ruby-throated zwinger, than what should be warbling in that moment?" 

Welkin squinted at the sky overhead. "Um. Well. Maybe a woodpecker?" 

Faldio laughed. "A woodpecker? It's a very different poem if that bird is not warbling beautifully but just _tap-tap-tapping_." He drummed his fingers against the café table for ironic emphasis. 

"But at least it would be _realistic_ , Faldio." 

"Yes, yes," Faldio had said with a sigh. He was no longer interested in litigating the poem and had hoped to leave it behind in Jansen's office. "I doubt the unknown poet knew much of the natural world. The literal choux and zwinger don't matter, you know. They're just convenient little markers for the poet to say _hello everything is fine and beautiful here in original paradise_." Faldio grinned. "And then, you know, disruption and disorder and a prince and his hunting dogs show up. Everything topsy-turvy. The world inverted." 

"But the world was already inverted," Welkin had said doggedly. "Everything was already out of order. The golden choux and the ruby-throated zwinger together? That's not a natural paradise. It's off-kilter. It's _unsettling_. There's already something _wrong_ about this forest before the prince shows up. By all rights, the choux and the zwinger together should fill us with dread." 

Faldio laughed out loud. "No, no. Come on, Welkin. A poet only has so many ways to say a thing, you know." He pointed to his own beer glass. "All the things in this poem are just...vessels, you know. Channels." He ran his index finger around the wet lip of the glass. "They're just containers. Meaningless in themselves. A poet cannot just come out and say _here is the thing I want to say_. He's got to say all those things disguised as other things. And it's the reader's job to open up those packages, to disregard the outer apperance and get at the inner meaning." 

"I don't see why," Welkin said, as wide-eyed and earnest as a lamb. "I don't see why he can't just say the thing that he means. I think everything would be a lot better if people just said the things that they meant." 

He smiled self-deprecatingly even as he spoke, and as he drew a hand through his already disheveled hair, a certain quality about how the afternoon light hit his flushed face and flattened shirt collar suddenly made the breath catch in Faldio's throat.

(A little later and a little more drunk, Faldio had thought _I will always remember this_ , but he had, of course, eventually forgotten it -- until a year later, sitting in a meadow at dawn and shredding blades of glass and feeling suddenly hollow and heavy, as if he were watching the approach of his personal Doom, as if he were hearing the baying cries of his own hunting dogs.) 

"Spoken like a true scientist," Faldio had said in the café that afternoon, after draining the rest of his beer in one draught.

Welkin gave a rueful smile. "I find plenty of poetry in science. And in the natural world. There is a real beauty in clarity, Faldio. It's just...honesty, really."

"Mmm," Faldio said. "Are you saying all poets are liars?" 

Welkin wrinkled his nose. "It's not lying. It's just...unnecessary confusion. And that does nobody any good." 

Faldio felt curiously restless, almost angry, but he maintained his expression of careless amusement. "But surely scientists do their own share of...hiding things within other things." He wiggled his fingers and then mimed opening up the top of a box. "Here is the species inside the genus, and here is the genus inside the family, and _here_ is the family within the order, class, phylum, kingdom." 

Welkin snorted. "It's not the same, Faldio." 

"All I'm saying," Faldio said, drawing out his vowels for emphasis, "is that everything has lots of other things hiding inside of it. There's no clarity to be had _anywhere_. All we can do is learn how to peel things apart." He paused. "Bloody hell, am I becoming Dr. Jansen?" 

Welkin laughed. "No fear of that, Faldio." 

Faldio regarded his empty beer glass meditatively. He did not think too hard about what he was about to say, and so he felt only mildly surprised when he heard his own voice say, "So what are your plans for the evening, old chum? We could stay here. Or we could go back to my rooms. My grandfather just sent me a bottle of port I've been meaning to try, and we could pick up some sausages on the way back..." 

(And as he had spoken in that cafe, two sets of flickering scenes had opened up in his mind, as if he were sitting in a dark room and someone was projecting slides onto the blank screen of his skull. One set of scenes was the past: _Faldio at boarding school; Faldio and his mates sitting around the common-room hearth and roasting purloined sausages on long metal forks and drinking smuggled bottles of ale after a triumphant rugby game; everyone sweaty and merry and drunk and leaning into one another, their damp hair brushing against cheeks and necks, their shoulders and knees jostling against one another; and who, afterward, could remember how it started and who suggested it, probably as a joke but also probably not as a joke: inquisitive long fingers and firm grips and giggles and desperate panting; and afterward, the fire dead and everyone a little hungover and tucking themselves back into their pants and a silent universal agreement that nothing had happened and this was nothing to think about nor remember; see you tomorrow at breakfast, lads_. 

And, simultaneous to that set of scenes, _overlapping_ that set of scenes, was another set of scenes from the future: _Welkin with his wide eyes and tousled hair; Welkin sprawled on the couch in Faldio's sitting room; Welkin unbuttoning the top of his shirt; Welkin turning to Faldio, his lips wet and parted; look, dear chum, old friend, darling boy, this is nothing to think about nor remember._ ) 

But then, in that moment in that long-ago afternoon in the café, Welkin was shaking his head, rooting around his pocket for coins, looking around for the waiter. "Sorry, Faldio. I promised Mary I'd help her with an experiment in the lab tonight. She wants to measure ragnite emanations on a gold-foil screen, but she's having some trouble with her apparatus." 

"Of course," Faldio said quietly, the images in his head flickering to a stop and everything growing quiet and dark. "Naturally." 

They parted. 

(Faldio, now in the meadow, could no longer recall what they had said or how they had said good-bye; his memory grew thin and faint at this point.) 

Afterward, Faldio had gone for a long, purposeless walk, and when that did not settle the curious restlessness he felt, he had visited Desdemona, a woman of negotiable affections who sat in a window on Buckler Street. She had taken him into her room upstairs, and after the usual grappling and tumbling on her thin mattress, Faldio had finally felt the nervous flutter leave him, like a butterfly departing a flower. In its place, a familiar heavy calm had descended upon him. 

Afterward, back in his own rooms, Faldio had one of the college scouts pour him a hot bath. He had leaned his head back against the hard edge of the tub and stared at the ceiling for a hour. The water became cool and gray around him. His fingertips became puckered and swollen. 

And then the next day had come, and the day after that -- each day dawning red and rosy with the same merciless inevitability -- and a week later, Faldio and Welkin were once again sitting together in Jansen's chthonic office, and Welkin was once again reading an earnestly bad essay as Jansen spluttered and raved. And Faldio had stared at the wall behind Jansen and felt that familiar sense of heavy calm still lying upon him, muffling everything and everyone. 

Afterward, Faldio and Welkin had walked out into the quad. Welkin was talking, and Faldio was responding at appropriate intervals, and nothing particularly important was being said. And then Welkin had paused and cocked his head and pointed. "Hear that, Faldio? It's a woodpecker." 

They both stopped, and now Faldio could hear the industrious _tap tap tap_ coming from the oak tree that grew on the other side of the college's low wall. 

"Are you sure?" Faldio asked, his brow arching, his mouth curling into an ironic smile. "Are you sure it's not...a ruby-throated zwinger?" 

(And even as he said it, he thought, _Maybe the poet couldn't bear to name the woodpecker directly, that steady tap tap tap, that inexorable heartbeat. Maybe the only way to put the woodpecker in the poem was to disguise him, make him a ruby-throated zwinger, hide him away until someone cut through the forest and went listening for him._ ) 

But Welkin only frowned at him quizzically. "No, Faldio," he said, slowly and clearly and a little pityingly, "it's a woodpecker. Anyway, it's too early for zwingers." He had clearly forgotten their conversation in the cafe the prior week. 

And Faldio had let his mouth settle back into its accustomed and familiar lines even as he had leaned back into that familiar, deadening calm. "Of course." 

That night, he had not been able to sleep, and once again, he had walked all over town. (Desdemona, alas, was not in her window.)

_Poor Welkin_ , he had thought at one point long past midnight, apropos of nothing. _A good-hearted lad. But a bit simple._

(The memory of Jansen's voice, irritated and high-pitched: _How many times must we have this conversation, young Gunther? A rose is not a rose, and I do not care about its appropriate growing conditions under indirect light. What does it mean as a symbol? What secret does it conceal?_ ) 

At some point later, back in his rooms and thinking about other things entirely, Faldio began coming up with several wonderful ideas about the nature of literature, truth, life, et cetera. He wrote many urgent notes about these ideas, and then he fell asleep at his desk. He woke up several hours later, with the red light of dawn beginning to bear through his window, and with some puzzlement he had gone through these notes. Most were illegible. One page just said, in all capital letters: TOPIC FOR JANSEN'S NEXT PAPER: WE ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO EXPRESS UNFORGIVABLE IDEAS IN PERMISSABLE SHAPES. 

(Needless to say, he had not used that topic in his next essay for Jansen. He had written something sensible and reasonable, and Jansen had grudgingly nodded and said, _You're coming along at last, Landzaat_.) 

And now, here in the meadow a year later, the sky was growing bright and pale and cold, its flush fading, its blood receding. 

"But I still remember the beginning of that poem," Faldio said. "I'll probably go to my grave remembering the beginning of that damn poem."

Beside him, Welkin responded with a light snore. 

Faldio turned to stare at him. "Are you asleep?" 

Welkin, eyes closed, said nothing. 

"Have you been asleep this whole time?" 

Welkin continued to breathe, deep and slow. 

Faldio only meant to smack him lightly in the shoulder, but he misjudged the degree of force and his angle of approach, and instead he punched Welkin very hard in the side of his stomach. 

Welkin toppled over with a cry of protest. "Agh!" 

Faldio glowered down at him. "Wake up." 

"What the heck, Faldio," Welkin said, pushing himself back into a sitting position. "What did you do that for?" 

"Time to get up," Faldio said, climbing to his feet. "Time to see about breakfast. See if they want us to move south today." 

Welkin scowled up at him, but he still took Faldio's proffered hand and let Faldio pull him to his feet. "You didn't have to hit me so hard," he said plaintively. 

"I didn't hit you that hard, old man," Faldio said. "And if you want, you can hit me back." He had spoken without thinking, but once he made the offer, he found he was not surprised by it. He found, in fact, that he wanted Welkin to strike him. 

In the distance, they could hear the distant clatter and rumble of the encampment waking up: the rising murmur of voices, the sound of someone hammering, an engine purring.

Welkin sighed. 

"No, really," Faldio said. "I insist." He spread his arms wide and waited. "Go ahead and hit me." 

"I don't see why--" Welkin said wearily. 

"You've demanded satisfaction," Faldio said. "Come and collect." 

(The long-ago poet builds a decoy bird as if to say _if you refuse to call something by its real name, does it really exist in the first place_?)

Welkin grimaced. "Fine." He folded his right hand into a fist and struck it against Faldio's chest -- not hard, but not gentle either. Instead, Welkin was firm and patient, like someone knocking on a door for the second time.

( _Like a woodpecker tapping on a tree_ , thought Faldio. _Like a heart beating against its ribs._ ) 

"There," Welkin said. "We're even." 

"We're even," Faldio said. "Now come on and let's see about breakfast."

He felt suddenly hungry, ravenous to the point of desperation.


End file.
